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Sammanfattning

An individual’s financial situation, and poverty touching a great number of people with severe mental illness, are not actualized in most psychiatric literature, research and practice. The users themselves point to economic strain as one of their most important problems, and an amount of sociological research work has pointed out the frequency of financial strain in this group of people. This article’s three main objectives are to summarize existing knowledge about serious mental illness and poverty, to summarize the main hypotheses about the connection between poverty and mental problems, and to present some empirical data gathered from different studies that problematize the traditional understanding of poverty and social isolation as consequences of serious mental illness and «negative symptoms.» The presentation puts in question the biological model that dominates psychiatric research and understanding of psychiatric problems, and is open to a possible shift of perspective.

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